Cremated ashes are unclaimed, but not unwanted

William Hageman, TRIBUNE NEWSPAPERSCHICAGO TRIBUNE

It's a small room that could be in anybody's basement. Paneled walls, concrete floor, low ceiling, fluorescent lights. Along two walls are 11 gray metal shelving units, the type sold at any home-improvement store.

It's what's on the shelves that sets this storage area apart: more than a hundred small cardboard boxes containing cremated human remains.

Each box -- the oldest dates to the late '60s -- has a person's name written on the outside, the cremation paperwork inside. These people lived, died, were cremated -- and then left behind by their families.

It's not a common occurrence; people in the funeral industry estimate that around 1 percent of cremated remains are not claimed. But at a funeral home that handles a couple of hundred clients a year, the numbers can add up.

David Fisher, an independent Chicago-area funeral director and embalmer, says the average funeral home might have four or five sets of ashes lying around. Jerry Sullivan, president of the Cremation Society of Illinois as well as the Netherlands-based International Cremation Federation, believes the number may be a little lower.

"I would say that every funeral home in the state of Illinois probably has one or two sets of cremated remains that people just never came back for," he says.

That leaves it to people like Sullivan to make a final call. And for him, that means storing them in this climate-controlled room in one of the Cremation Society's facilities in a Chicago suburb.

"I've been in the (funeral) business since 1970," he says. "My parents had a funeral home from 1952. So I've got some of theirs. I have some from businesses we've bought or inherited. There was one guy, we were going to buy his funeral home and the deal fell through and it was sold as a condo. He had these cremated remains and we took custody of them for him.

"I remember, we bought a funeral home. And there was a file cabinet there. We assumed it was files. Then we opened it and there were 10 or 15 sets of cremated remains. We still have them."

Sullivan has stronger connections to others in his storeroom.

"If they're from the '80s or early '90s, I made all the arrangements," he says.

Some of those now in storage were friends or acquaintances. On one shelf resides a machine shop owner Sullivan knew. Side-by-side on another shelf are two brothers he remembers. He is on a first-name basis with Mary and Roy. He knew them all in life and feels close to them in death, certainly closer than the family members who never claimed their loved ones' remains.

"Oddly enough, to me, it feels like they're relatives," he says. "We had some connection with them at some time. I just don't feel comfortable making a disposition (of the remains). I feel they're in better care with me than with somebody else."

He also finds satisfaction when someone does reclaim a lost relative, and he doesn't really care why a person ended up on his gray shelves.

"When they do come in, it's hard to beat 'em up," he says. "You can't say, 'We've had custody for nine years and now you owe us $3,000.' We just feel good about reuniting them."

State law is fuzzy regarding a deadline for the disposition of remains. The statutes have been tinkered with over the years, and many funeral home directors play it safe and hold on to the remains out of concern that should they bury or scatter the ashes, a long-lost relative will show up and demand the remains.

Unclaimed remains can be handled in several ways. Some end up in storage. Often, Fisher says, funeral homes "move them out of one location and bring them to one central location."

Dignity Memorial, a Houston-based company that operates 45 funeral homes and cemeteries in the Chicago area, does that with its unclaimed remains. It has a mausoleum at one of its cemeteries where the ashes are stored, according to David Klein, a market manager for the Chicago area.

"When we do have unclaimed cremated remains, what we will do is take a common crypt at a mausoleum and put those remains in a safe place," he says. "We do all the proper documentation. ... We will keep those cremated remains for as long as needed and document where they are. So (if) a family (later) calls the funeral home, the funeral home can tell the family where those cremated remains are."

Still, the question remains: How does a family member get left behind and forgotten?

Back before prepaid funerals, some families couldn't pay the funeral director's bill and were reluctant to drop by the funeral home. Sometimes families aren't especially close and no one wants to take responsibility for a distant relative. Or maybe the survivors don't know what to do with remains, so they do nothing.

"I think, probably, the most common reason was they just didn't want them," says Fisher, who has been licensed for 22 years. "They didn't have any idea what they wanted to do, so they just left them at the funeral home."

Adds Klein: "Oftentimes families may not be aware of the options they have after cremating their loved ones or choosing that as the method of disposition. They're not aware how they can purchase cemetery property, or (the availability of) a cemetery mausoleum for a crypt in order to permanently place their loved one. Other times, a family is undecided ... so they wait. Other times they leave them at the funeral home with the anticipation they're going to make a decision, and unfortunately time passes and those primary decision-makers aren't sure what direction to go."

The funeral director is left with the ashes. "The general consensus with funeral directors and cremation people is we never dispose of them without them being retrievable," Sullivan says.

That's why funeral directors make every effort to get the remains returned to family members, using phone calls and letters to prod survivors to come in and take possession.

"Usually it's about a 60- to 90-day time when we start to encourage a family more aggressively to come on in, meet with us again," Klein says. "Or if there's just no contact we'll continue to hold them over the next two or three months as well, till a point when we feel comfortable enough -- it could be nine months or a year -- that we can say, OK, we've done our duty."

Once they've fulfilled their legal obligations and all else fails -- sending the remains by registered mail is also an option -- funeral directors are on their own.

"Some funeral homes will pay to have them buried," Fisher says. "Some scatter them, or have a scattering service over Lake Michigan."

Says Sullivan: "I know some put them in a mausoleum niche or have a burial. It just seems impersonal to me."

So he holds on to the boxes until someone claims them.

"Our record is nine years," he said.

But records are made to be broken. Less than an hour after he said that in a late December interview, Sullivan received a call from a man seeking the ashes of his sister, who died in 1991. A family dispute with the woman's ex-husband was the reason for the disconnect. The ex-husband recently died, and the brother began pursuing his sister's whereabouts.

Sullivan knew right where the remains were.

"He wants them buried with their mother and father at Beverly (Cemetery)," he said later. "He wanted to purchase an urn and have us take her to the cemetery and bury her for him."

The woman, though, is in the minority.

"I don't think 100 percent of them will be returned to the family," Sullivan says of the stored remains. "We have them, we have the space. It seems OK."

More information on cremation can be found at cremation-society.com, dignitymemorial.com and simplicitycremationcare.com.

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Where the remains go

Exact numbers are difficult to come by, but the Cremation Association of North America conducted a survey in 2006 that found that about 1 percent of cremated remains were never picked up. Of those that were, about 38 percent were kept at home, 37 percent were buried, 21 percent were scattered and about 3 percent were placed in a columbarium.

Other cremation facts

The Cremation Association of North America projects that 35 percent of U.S. deaths in 2010 will end in cremation. By 2025, that number is expected to increase to 59 percent.

The national cremation rate in the U.S. was 26 percent in 2000; in Canada that year it was 45 percent.

Cremation takes two to three hours, at a temperature between 1,500 and 2,000 degrees, for an average-size adult.

Cremated remains for a typical person weigh between 6 and 8 pounds.

The state with the highest rate of cremation is Nevada (70 percent); the lowest rate is in Mississippi (10 percent).

The top five reasons for choosing cremation, according to a 2005 survey by the Wirthlin Group: saves money (30 percent), saves land (13 percent), simpler (8 percent), body not in earth (6 percent) and preference (6 percent).

Sources: The Cremation Association of North America; The Internet Cremation Society; 2005 study of American Attitudes Towards Ritualization & Memorialization